Chicago Boyzhttp://chicagoboyz.net
Some Chicago Boyz know each other from student days at the University of Chicago. Others are Chicago boys in spirit. The blog name is also intended as a good-humored gesture of admiration for distinguished Chicago boys including those pictured above.Tue, 31 Mar 2015 01:03:21 +0000en-UShourly1http://wordpress.org/?v=4.1.1Powering Down: “Earth Hour”http://chicagoboyz.net/archives/48008.html
http://chicagoboyz.net/archives/48008.html#commentsMon, 30 Mar 2015 20:33:16 +0000http://chicagoboyz.net/?p=48008American Digest:

Once upon a time we knew enough to curse the darkness. In the aeons long climb from the muck, we have only had the ability to hold back the dark for a bit over a century. Now millions yearn to embrace it and, should they yearn long enough and hard enough, the darkness will embrace them and hold them for much longer than a brief hour of preening and self-regard.

The Big Picture at the Boston Globe site routinely publishes stunning photographs of what is taking place in the world. But at editor Alan Taylor’s whim after last year’s “Earth Hour”, it went a step further in “celebrating” the rise of mass insanity in our age. “Earth Hour 2009″presents a round-the-world tour of cities with each picture designed to fade from light into darkness at the click of a mouse. Proud of his clever variation on a theme, the editor’s instructions were — without a hint of irony:

“[click image to see it fade]”

Of course with a second mouse click the lights came back on. It never seems to occur to the people with the Green Disease, that is perfectly possible to

[click civilization to see it fade]

and get no second click.

****

I’ve done four posts with the “Powering Down” heading, all relating to the stream of political and social attacks which are being conducted against the West’s energy sources and industrial base. These attacks are usually justified by “environmentalism” raised to the status of a religion; often, they are also motivated by individual and/or group desires to align themselves with technologies and trends that are considered “cool” and to avoid any connection with technologies and trends that are considered “uncool.”

Powering Down #1: Here’s the great French scientist Sadi Carnot, writing in 1824:

To take away England’s steam engines to-day would amount to robbing her of her iron and coal, to drying up her sources of wealth, to ruining her means of prosperity and destroying her great power. The destruction of her shipping, commonly regarded as her source of strength, would perhaps be less disastrous for her.

For England in 1824, substitute the United States in 2009. And for “steam engines,” substitute those power sources which use carbon-based fuels: whether generating stations burning natural gas, blast furnaces burning coke, or trucks/trains/planes/automobiles using oil derivatives. With these substitutions, Carnot’s paragraph describes the prospective impact of this administration’s energy policies: conducting a war on fossil fuels, without leveling with people about the true limitations of “alternative” energy technologies and without seriously pursuing civilian nuclear power.

Powering Down #2:Patrick Richardson: Kansas is ranked second in the nation behind Montana for wind energy potential, a fact which should have environmentalists jumping for joy. Instead, they’re trying to block the construction of transmission lines to wind farms in south central Kansas and north central Oklahoma.

Why? Well it all has to do with the lesser prairie chicken. According to a story by the Hutchinson News in February of this year, ranchers and wildlife officials in the area are teaming up with groups like the Sierra Club to block the construction of the lines, which would apparently run through prime breeding territory for the bird.

Powering Down #3: The California Water Resources Board has ruled that 19 natural gas power plants, located in coastal areas, are in violation of the Clean Water Act for using a technique called “once-through cooling.” According to this article, it appears that this ruling will result in the shutdown of most of these plants. continued

Powering Down #4: George Will writes about the the attack that Obama’s EPA is conducting against the Navajo Generating Station, which together with the coal mine that feeds it represents an important factor in Arizona’s economy and an important source of employment for members of the Navajo tribe.

Will notes that the NGS provides 95 percent of the power for the pumps of the Central Arizona Project, which routes water from the Colorado River and which made Phoenix and most of modern Arizona possible. A study sponsored by the Interior Department estimates that the EPA’s mandate might increase the cost of water by as much as 32 percent, hitting agriculture users especially hard.

]]>http://chicagoboyz.net/archives/48008.html/feed8History Weekend: The Curious Case of Ma and Pahttp://chicagoboyz.net/archives/47993.html
http://chicagoboyz.net/archives/47993.html#commentsSun, 29 Mar 2015 20:26:54 +0000http://chicagoboyz.net/?p=47993Exactly a hundred years ago, an enterprising gentleman named James Edward Ferguson took office as the Governor of Texas. He was of a generation born long enough after the conclusion of the Civil War that hardships associated with that war had faded somewhat. The half-century long conflict with raiding Comanche and Kiowa war-bands was brought to a conclusion around the time of his birth, but he was still young enough to have racketed around the Wild West as it existed for the remainder of the century, variously employed in a mine, a factory making barbed wire, a wheat farm and a vineyard. Having gotten all that out of his system, he returned to Bell County, Texas, studied law, was admitted to the bar, and married the daughter of a neighbor, Miriam Amanda Wallace. Miriam Amanda was then almost 25, and had been to college. James Ferguson and his wife settled down to a life of quiet prosperity in Belton, Texas. There he founded a bank and dabbled in politics as a campaign manager, before running for and winning the office of governor in 1914 – as a Democrat, which was expected at the time and in that place – and as an anti-prohibitionist, which perhaps was not. Two years later, having not done anything in office which could be held against him, James Ferguson was re-elected … and almost immediately walked into a buzz-saw. A quarrel over appropriations for the University of Texas system and a political rival for the office of governor – ensconced among the facility as the newly-anointed head of a newly-established school of journalism – eventually blew up into such a huge ruckus that James Ferguson was impeached, with the result that he could not hold public office in Texas again – at least not under his own name.

With the hindsight of extreme cynicism regarding the press when dealing in personalities and matters political, one can wonder how much of the ruckus concerned his actual conduct in office, and how much was created by the state press. His erstwhile rival owned one, had connections with others, and had the backing of the intellectual elite of Texas as it was then. He was also generally anti-Prohibition, which lead to dark whispers that he was in the pockets of the brewing industry. Rather than continue being politically active as a ‘behind the scenes fixer’ James Edward Ferguson came up with a brilliant solution: put his wife out there as a gubernatorial candidate in 1924. Yes, Miriam Amanda Wallace Ferguson, likely rather brainy (being that she had married rather later than one might have expected of a woman of that time, and indulged in education well beyond high school) but in personality rather retiring, hit the campaign hustings with her loyal hubby ever at her side. Her campaign slogan was “Two Governors for the Price of One,” or alternately “Me for Ma, and I ain’t got a durn thing against Pa,” Her husband put on the folksy touch of calling her “Ma” and himself “Pa” – as he was ever a strong advocate of rural farmers and would have their undying support for most of the rest of their joint careers. Miriam Ferguson asked for the votes – and of women especially – as a reaffirmation and support of her husband.

And she was elected, likely to the horror and consternation of her husband’s political foes. She was the first elected female governor of Texas and the second elected female governor in the nation – although there is not much contention that “Pa” Ferguson was the real power behind the chair, as it were. She ran for office again in 1932 – winning a second term. Although she and “Pa” campaigned as folksy, down-to-earth populists, they were in no sense ‘rubes’; teetotalers both, they fiercely opposed Prohibition. “Ma” Ferguson was also generous with the pardoning authority of her office; over the course of two terms, she exercised it some 4,000 times – mostly, it should be noted – for violating various prohibition laws. Rumors did persist, then and rewards that many such pardons were in exchange for cash paid to the governor’s husband. One rather amusing but apocryphal tale had it that a man began walking through a door at the same time as Mrs. Ferguson: “Oh, pardon me,” he said, as the manners of the time required, and Mrs. Ferguson answered, “Sure, come on in – it’ll only take a minute or two to do the paper-work.” She has also (along with a great many other personalities held by their so-called betters to be ignorant and backward) credited with the remark to the effect that if English was good enough for Jesus Christ it ought to be good enough for the children of Texas.

And the Ferguson team also came out against the Klu Klux Klan, then very much a powerful force in the rural South and Midwest. In Texas, the Klan’s activities were not so much racism, as it was nativist and wedded to a certain kind of moral authoritarianism, prone to punishing people suspected of adultery, gambling, sexual transgressions, bootlegging and speaking German in public. This tended to excite disapproval among thoughtful citizens who professed to uphold the rule of law. While the Klan could and did control certain elections, especially at the local level – there were organizations just as vehemently opposed to their activities; various influential urban newspapers such as the Houston Chronicle, the Chambers of Commerce, the Masons, the State Bar Association, and a number of citizen’s organizations. As part of her first campaign, Ma Ferguson promised an anti-mask law, targeting the Klan, making it illegal for any so-called secret society to allow members to appear masked or disguised in public. KKK membership in Texas dropped precipitously and continued to drop; whether Team Ferguson’s activities had anything to do with it, or they were shrewd and farsighted enough to see the trend and get aboard is a matter of contention for specialist historians. Still – for a couple who were and probably are still dismissed as a pair of rubes, they chose to oppose one of the stupidest but most well-meant popular social efforts of the early 20th century, and one of stupidest and most brutal organizations as well.

(The Fergusons more or less retired from politics in the mid-1930s. Pa Ferguson died in 1944, but Ma lived until 1961. They are buried next to each other in the Texas State Cemetery in Austin.)

]]>http://chicagoboyz.net/archives/47993.html/feed9Technology and Mass Transithttp://chicagoboyz.net/archives/47988.html
http://chicagoboyz.net/archives/47988.html#commentsSun, 29 Mar 2015 15:02:17 +0000http://chicagoboyz.net/?p=47988I have not seen a formal study of the impact of technology on mass transit but I believe that it has made it profoundly more valuable and useful. And I accidentally participated in an experiment that partially proved this statement in the inverse.

In Chicago they have a CTA “bus tracker” that tells you when a particular bus will arrive at your stop. Or you can program it so that you can see all the buses from various routes that are coming past your stop (this is useful because in Chicago you can often take many different routes that go to the same place over shorter distances). It works on your phone and many of the newer stops have the bus tracker programmed into the canopy so you don’t even need to look it up on your phone.

Sadly enough most days rather than looking up the street for buses I check the bus tracker. I can usually get from my condo down the elevator and past the lobby in 2-3 minutes so 4 minutes is the cut off time. One morning I looked and I thought I had missed the bus entirely because the next one was ten minutes away on my phone. However, instead of just trudging off, I looked up, and a bus was right there!

I got on the bus and it was completely empty! Not a soul was on the bus. While it was a nice day, usually this bus line was crowded during rush hour, often so crowded that I don’t even bother getting on because I have to stand right in the front past the yellow line where you aren’t supposed to stand and then get on and off with every stop (to let people on and off) until the crowd thins out.

The driver was totally bewildered too. I sat with her up front and I guess they had changed the bus she was driving to this route (from another route) and they hadn’t updated bus tracker. I said that because she didn’t show up on my bus tracker. Thus no one was on the bus – because if it wasn’t on bus tracker, it didn’t exist.

I am sure that the River North area is one of the most technologically sophisticated areas of the city and probably in other parts of town people just wait at the bus stop for the bus to show up. But in River North – everyone has been trained to use bus tracker and rely on it and they wouldn’t contemplate a bus existing that wasn’t on bus tracker.

For me, the bus tracker has made the Chicago bus go from something marginally useful to a highly useful way to get around town. When I lived in Bucktown we used to wait for the #50 Damen bus and 3 of 4 times we’d give up and grab a cab after waiting 15-20 minutes and the 4th time 2-3 buses would show up in a big bunch full of angry riders. If you took the bus you weren’t happy about it; it was an unreliable and slow way to get around.

However, bus tracker is very reliable and now you have visibility of what is coming and you can plan ahead so that you are whiling away your day standing outside in the rain or snow waiting in vain for a bus that seems like it will never come. I don’t have statistics but I would bet that bus tracker increases utilization of assets for the CTA and has become a known and reliable method of transportation for those that give it a chance.

]]>http://chicagoboyz.net/archives/47988.html/feed22A Brave Authorhttp://chicagoboyz.net/archives/47986.html
http://chicagoboyz.net/archives/47986.html#commentsSun, 29 Mar 2015 14:52:49 +0000http://chicagoboyz.net/?p=47986I remember reading an article a long time ago about advice that an experienced journalist gave a new writer in the newsroom. He said to “never write anything bad about cats” because the paper would be bombarded with letters from irate cat owners in response.

I thought of this as I read a NYT article titled “Pregnant, Obese and in Danger” by Claire Putnam (a doctor at a Kaiser Permanente hospital). From the article:

One recent night on my delivery shift, 8 out of 10 of my laboring patients were too heavy, with 2 weighing over 300 pounds… obese pregnant patients are more likely to have elevated blood pressure, gestational diabetes and babies with birth complications. The are more likely to need cesareans. And the are more likely to have serious complications from the surgery, such as infections, hernias, or life-threatening bleeding.

An extended family member of mine was a medical EMT and he mentioned how many of his co-workers were hurt while moving and assisting the obese and morbidly obese. This doctor agrees.

In the last year alone, three of the doctors I work with have been significantly injured while treating severely obese women. One even dislocated his shoulder while performing a cesarean on a 400-pound patient.

This author is incredibly brave because I can only imagine the vitriol that this sort of analysis will generate in the comments and on social media. They will say that you are making fun of women for whom their weight is out of their control! You are contributing to negative body image in the media!

The story of the negative impact on health care workers of the obese and the extra costs on society should be factually driven and discussed openly. In the same way that the addicts in Drugs, Inc pose huge challenges on the system through their lifestyle choices (which are universally panned, unlike the obese), these sorts of behaviors should be questioned as well.

In 1850, Adam Swann returned from India to his native England, having decided that a career in military service (especially in what he now viewed as basically a mercenary force, the East India Company’s army) was not for him. He had in his possession a valuable cache of jewelry which he had acquired on a battlefield and (probably illegally) kept for himself. While in India he had kept abreast of events in England by reading several-month-old newspapers, and was intrigued with the possibilities unleashed by industrial expansion. His original intention was to sell the jewelry and invest the proceeds in railway stock or in actually building a railroad branch line somewhere–but was dissuaded by a chance meeting with a railroad official, who advised him that railway building was in a bubble and that most of the lines now being constructed would prove uneconomic. The official had, however, an alternative suggestion: put the money on the horses. But not in the usual way.

There’s more future in horse-transport than the Cleverdicks would have you believe. The railroads can solve all the big problems but none of the small ones…If I were you, Mr Swann–and I wish to God I were and starting all over again–I would spend the next week studying the blank areas of that map there. Then travel about and take a look at the goods yards of the most successful companies, and see merchandise piled in the rain on all their loading bays for want of a good dispersal system.

Swann takes the man’s advice and sets off on a cross-country ride to evaluate the prospects for a new horse-drawn freight transportation business. On the way, he meets Henrietta, who is fleeing a prospective marriage arranged by her father, a coarse and greedy mill owner. It is Henrietta who proposes for the projected transport company the name Swann-on-Wheels and the wheeled-swan logo that will soon adorn the sides of hundreds of wagons rolling throughout Britain.

The series is the story of Swann-on-Wheels, of Adam and Henrietta’s marriage and family, and of British society in the time period 1850-1914. Unlike most historical novels covering this period, the aristocracy plays a very minor part, to the point of being almost completely irrelevant to the story, other than as a source of status markers:

In the England into which he had been born, blood and breeding were still paramount and continued to call the national tune. Ancient wealth was still the legislator and determiner of the national destiny. But all this had changed when he was still a lad. By then the man of brass and the man of iron had come into their own, elbowing their way forward and demanding, at the top of their voices to be heard and heeded…Adam, who sometimes conjured with these abstracts, saw the process as a second Reformation, a phase of history repeating itself, with inventors, engineers, and their sponsors matching the hard-faced adventurers of Tudor times…For his part, he welcomed the transformation. To him it was a cleansing tide, notwithstanding the mountains of muck and rubble it left behind…(but) it seemed to him that the wives and daughters of the men of brass took no pride in their menfolk’s astounding victory. All they wanted, it appeared, was to replace their former masters without deviation by so much as a single inch from their ways of life, or discarding a single one of their prejudices.

Adam Swann is a mild nonconformist and rather a crusader, albeit more of the evolutionary than the revolutionary type: his approach to management is much more collaborative and decentralized than that of his tyrannical father-in-law, and he is willing to take a chance on hiring and promoting boys from the streets, some of whom rise to high positions in the company. He does not totally share the Victorian worldview: most especially, he does not believe that sexual pleasure should be reserved for the male and that the woman’s role is to “lie back and think of England.” Nor does he share the High Church attitude toward the Dissenters.

I am very impressed by the author’s achievement in bringing a fictional business organization to life. The strategic issues and mistakes, the personalities of the various region managers (“viceroys”) and the interactions among them, the operational and financial crises, the whimsical internal names assigned to the regions…these things are very well sketched, if perhaps in a little too much detail for many readers. (Someone at Amazon observed that “His world of Victorian transport is as elaborate and and extensive as any of Tolkien’s fantasies”)

While Adam is the main character, there are frequent shifts to the viewpoints of other characters. Delderfield seems to make a special effort to get inside the heads and skins of his female characters. Few of the characters, male or female, are irredeemably bad: just about everyone has something to be said in his or her favor.

More attuned to the deeper trends in society than those around him, Adam by 1914 is seriously concerned not only about some problems affecting the transport business (by now largely motorized) but about the state of British and European civilization as a whole.

You’re all sleep-walking, and if you don’t prick yourselves awake you’re in for a God Almighty tumble. For here we are, with everything to make a new world and a new society, but all people with money in their pockets are concerned with is a month at the seaside, the next country house-party, Fanny’s coming-out dress, a search for gentility and soft living generally. Even the international apparatus we rely on to keep the garden-party going is as antiquated as feudalism and not nearly so efficient, and this attitude has a nasty habit of spreading down to the city clerk, whose main ambition nowadays is to hoist himself another niche up the social scale. Not that there’s anything wrong with that–as a spur, for it’s what makes the world go round. What’s wrong is the way he goes about it. Not by hard work, clear thinking, self-education, and self-reliance, but by putting on airs, currying favor with the fellow above him, and learning to talk with a plum in his mouth. It’s all a sham, and I hate shams wherever I find ‘em.

A very worthwhile series of books, which in addition to its coverage of Swann-on-Wheels provides a good picture of the regions of Britain and the events and trends affecting that country throughout the period. Recommended. For those lacking in-depth familiarity with the geography of Britain, a good map would be a worthwhile companion for this book.

President Abed Rabbo Mansour Hadi fled Yemen by sea Wednesday as Shiite rebels and their allies moved on his last refuge in the south, captured its airport and put a bounty on his head, officials said.

The departure of the close U.S. ally and the imminent fall of the southern port of Aden pushed Yemen further toward a violent collapse. It also threatened to turn the impoverished but strategic country into another proxy battle between the Middle East’s Sunni powers and Shiite-led Iran.

Saudi Arabia and its Gulf allies believe the Shiite rebels, known as Houthis, are tools for Iran to seize control of Yemen and say they intend to stop the takeover. The Houthis deny they are backed by Iran.

The question is whether the Saudis will fall to their own Shiite population and whether the capture of Aden will allow Iran to block Saudi oil shipments.

“Once hailed by President Barack Obama as a model for fighting extremism, the U.S. counterterrorism strategy in Yemen has all but collapsed as the country descends into chaos, according to U.S. and Yemeni officials.”

“It is the model that we’re going to have to work with, because the alternative would be massive U.S. deployments in perpetuity, which would create its own blowback and cause probably more problems than it would potentially solve,” Obama said in January as the situation in Yemen deteriorated.

Now, virtually all of the Yemeni troops that had worked with the U.S. are engaged on one side or another of a three-pronged political struggle between the remnants of the Hadi government, supporters of former President Ali Abdullah Saleh, and the Houthi faction, U.S. officials say. The officials insisted on anonymity because they were not authorized to speak by name about sensitive intelligence assessments.

Yemen is lost. Will Saudi be next ?

The straits at Aden are a choke point for the Gulf.

The former diplomat said Iran hoped to establish a new base of operations in Yemen similar to its de facto outpost in southern Lebanon – controlled by the Shiite militant group Hezbollah.

The political, but also the economic stakes are huge.

“What’s most important is that this new base would be located in the Bab al-Mandeb strait, where between 70 and 80 percent of the world oil trade passes. So, with the Strait of Hormuz, Iran would control two straits, obligating the world to treat it as a business partner,” Gauthier added.

Here is the fruit of Obama’s feckless policy in Iraq and his flirtation with Iran.

Security is a concern at Bab al Mandab, which stands, along with the Suez Canal and the Strait of Hormuz, as one of the world’s major oil-supply choke points. Yemen’s national security forces and its coast guard have been strained since the country’s revolution took root in 2011.

Some Western officials worry that Iran could use military allies along Bab al Mandab to disrupt shipping there, as it has attempted to do along its own coast on the Strait of Hormuz. Together, the Strait of Hormuz and Bab al Mandab are conduits for 22% of the world’s oil supply, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration.

“If the Iranians are able to control Bab al Mandab and the Strait of Hormuz, they’d be able to have a chokehold on the global economy,” a Western diplomat in San’a said.

It looks like this will be the next step. The fall of Saudi Arabia may follow.

President Barack Obama has yet to meet with the new head of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, and won’t see Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg this week, even though he is in Washington for three days. Stoltenberg’s office requested a meeting with Obama well in advance of the visit, but never heard anything from the White House, two sources close to the NATO chief told me.

The leaders of almost all the other 28 NATO member countries have made time for Stoltenberg since he took over the world’s largest military alliance in October. Stoltenberg, twice the prime minister of Norway, met Monday with Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper in Ottawa to discuss the threat of the Islamic State and the crisis in Ukraine, two issues near the top of Obama’s agenda.

Kurt Volker, who served as the U.S. permanent representative to NATO under both President George W. Bush and Obama, said the president broke a long tradition. “The Bush administration held a firm line that if the NATO secretary general came to town, he would be seen by the president … so as not to diminish his stature or authority,” he told me.

After Saudi, of course, comes the NATO Alliance or what is left of it.

America’s commitment to defend its NATO allies is its biggest treaty obligation, said Volker, adding that European security is at its most perilous moment since the Cold War. Russia has moved troops and weapons into eastern Ukraine, annexed Crimea, placed nuclear-capable missiles in striking distance of NATO allies, flown strategic-bomber mock runs in the North Atlantic, practiced attack approaches on the U.K. and Sweden, and this week threatened to aim nuclear missiles at Denmark’s warships.

“It is hard for me to believe that the president of the United States has not found the time to meet with the current secretary general of NATO given the magnitude of what this implies, and the responsibilities of his office,” Volker said.

Bernadette Meehan, a spokeswoman for the National Security Council, declined to say why Obama didn’t respond to Stoltenberg’s request. “We don’t have any meetings to announce at this time,” she told me in a statement. Sources told me that Stoltenberg was able to arrange a last-minute meeting with Defense Secretary Ashton Carter.

Welcome to Obamaworld.

Now, as the conflict between Iran and Saudi Arabia moves directly to the borders of the Kingdom itself, Obama is like a deer in the headlights, incapable of any meaningful action. He’s been reduced to hoping that Tehran throws him a bone. The man who depicted himself as a transcendent figure on history’s stage, who described his foreign policy vision at the Temple of Hercules has been out-thought, out-generaled and completely outclassed by men with far fewer resources, but a great deal more ability than himself.

God help us. The Saudis are trying to rally Sunni countries but Pakistan turned them down when they asked for troops last week.

Saudi Arabia faces the risk of the turmoil spilling across its porous 1,100 mile-long border with Yemen and into its Shi’ite Eastern Province where the kingdom’s richest oil deposits lie.

Riyadh hosted top-level talks with Gulf Arab neighbors on Saturday that backed Hadi as Yemen’s legitimate president and offered “all efforts” to preserve the country’s stability.

Saudi Foreign Minister Saud al-Faisal said on Monday Arab countries would take necessary measures to protect the region against “aggression” by the Houthi movement if a peaceful solution could not be found.

All we can do is Drill, Baby, Drill and get our own energy supplies maxed out.

Never before has a country repeatedly declared its goal was “death to America,” taken clear actions to achieve that aim, and suffered no serious consequences for its actions. The reason for this is Iran’s diplomatic brilliance. They have conditioned successive administrations as easily as Pavlov: They hint at diplomacy, and get a free pass for abusing and murdering Americans.

Rubin is spot-on, and his critique applies to US administrations of both parties, from Carter’s to Obama’s. The Iranian regime has never paid a significant price for its numerous attacks against Americans and American interests. We may pay a high price for this failure.

]]>http://chicagoboyz.net/archives/47966.html/feed19El Caminito del Rey Updatehttp://chicagoboyz.net/archives/47958.html
http://chicagoboyz.net/archives/47958.html#commentsWed, 25 Mar 2015 17:46:30 +0000http://chicagoboyz.net/?p=47958One of the best vacations I ever took was with Jonathan as we tackled the famous El Caminito del Rey. You can see footage of that glorious day here:

For those who may be a little less adventurous, parts of the route have been re-built and are now officially re-opening. You can see a website on the Caminito and the restorations here.

]]>http://chicagoboyz.net/archives/47958.html/feed8A Tribute to Lee Kwan Yew.http://chicagoboyz.net/archives/47948.html
http://chicagoboyz.net/archives/47948.html#commentsTue, 24 Mar 2015 17:10:42 +0000http://chicagoboyz.net/?p=47948Thomas Sowell has a fine tribute to the leader of Singapore who died yesterday.

It is not often that the leader of a small city-state — in this case, Singapore — gets an international reputation. But no one deserved it more than Lee Kuan Yew, the founder of Singapore as an independent country in 1959, and its prime minister from 1959 to 1990. With his death, he leaves behind a legacy valuable not only to Singapore but to the world.

Born in Singapore in 1923, when it was a British colony, Lee Kuan Yew studied at Cambridge University after World War II, and was much impressed by the orderly, law-abiding England of that day. It was a great contrast with the poverty-stricken and crime-ridden Singapore of that era.

Today Singapore has a per capita Gross Domestic Product more than 50 percent higher than that of the United Kingdom and a crime rate a small fraction of that in England. A 2010 study showed more patents and patent applications from the small city-state of Singapore than from Russia. Few places in the world can match Singapore for cleanliness and orderliness.

Lee graduated from Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge University, with a double starred-first-class honours in law. In 1950, he became a barrister of the Middle Temple and practised law until 1959. He co-founded and was the first secretary-general of the People’s Action Party (PAP), leading it to eight consecutive victories. He campaigned for merger with Malaysia, a move deemed crucial to persuading Britain to relinquish its colonial rule in 1963; but racial strife and political tensions led to Singapore’s separation from the Federation two years later. Leading a newly independent Singapore from 1965, with overwhelming parliamentary control, Lee oversaw the nation’s transformation from a relatively underdeveloped colonial outpost with no natural resources into an Asian Tiger economy. In the process, he forged a widely admired system of meritocratic, clean, self-reliant and efficient government and civil service, much of which is now taught at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy.

Pragmatic even about death and averse to a cult of personality, Mr. Lee, who died Monday at age 91, said the house would cost too much to maintain and would become a shambles when “people trudge through.”

There was no wrecking ball on Mr. Lee’s quiet street on Tuesday, and the official memorial does not begin until the public viewing of his coffin in Parliament on Wednesday.

But Singaporeans are asking the same questions about the larger house that Lee Kuan Yew built — modern Singapore and the vaunted “Singapore model.” Will it survive him, or has the sleek Asian financial hub outgrown his father-knows-best style of government?

Among members of the country’s increasingly assertive and demanding electorate, there are calls for a new social contract, a more consultative government and participatory rule-making.

They may be ready for democracy now but there was no question about it then. What a contrast to the machinations going on now.

]]>http://chicagoboyz.net/archives/47948.html/feed3So: how does it feel at World’s End?http://chicagoboyz.net/archives/47939.html
http://chicagoboyz.net/archives/47939.html#commentsTue, 24 Mar 2015 17:01:20 +0000http://chicagoboyz.net/?p=47939[ Reposted from Zenpundit ICYMI there — on conveying the experience of the eschatological — on the way to better understanding the allure of IS ]
.

And the fifth Angel sounded the trumpet: and I saw a star fall from heaven upon the earth, and to him was given the key of the bottomless pit

**

WE ARE ENTERING PHASE TWO:

I think we’re entering Phase Two of our conversations about Islamist eschatology.

In Phase One, the task was to point out that apocalyptic scriptures and scriptural interpretations were a feature of Al-Qaida discourse, and specifically used in recruitment, and this phase was necessary because apocalyptic movements, in general, are all too easily dismissed by the secular mind until “too late” — think Aum Shinrikyo in Tokyo, the Branch Davidians in Waco, Heaven’s Gate in Rancho Santa Fe.

that there’s a largely and unwisely ignored area of religious studies dealing specifically with eschatological violence, and

that the sense of living in eschatological time is viscerally different — I’ve termed it a “force multiplier”

In particular, IS strategy is likely to draw in part on the specifically eschatological last hundred pages in Abu Musab al-Suri‘s 1600-page Call to Global Islamic Resistance. As I noted in my review of Jean-Pierre Filiu’s Apocalypse in Islam, Filiu himself states there is “nothing in the least rhetorical about this exercise in apocalyptic exegesis. It is meant instead as a guide for action”. While Filiu devotes several pages to it, Jim Lacey ignores it completely in his A Terrorist’s Call to Global Jihad: Deciphering Abu Musab al-Suri’s Islamic Jihad Manifesto, commenting only, “Where appropriate, we have also removed most of the repetitive theological justifications undergirding these beliefs” — see my review of Lacey for the Air force Research Institute.

I’ll deal with the religious studies literature on violent apocalyptic movements in a future post.

This post is my first attempt at addressing the feeling engendered by being swept up in an “end times’ movement. I foresee this as my major upcoming area of interest and future contributions.

**

SUGGESTED CONTEXTS:

There’s an extraordinary paragraph in Seduction of the Spirit by Harvey Cox, the prominent Harvard theologian, in which he tells us what the world’s next great encyclopedic work on religion might be like — using the analogy of Thomas Aquinas‘ Summa Theologica in a decidedly post-psychedelic age:

Thus the next Summa might consist not of a thousand chapters but of a thousand alternative states of being, held together not by a glued binding but by the fact that all thousand are equally real.

Imagine what kind of world it would be if instead of merely tolerating or studying them, one could actually be, temporarily at least, a Sioux brave seeing an ordeal vision, a neolithic hunter prostrate before the sacred fire, a Krishna lovingly ravishing a woodsful of goat girls, a sixteenth-century Carmelite nun caught up in ecstatic prayer, a prophet touched by flame to go release a captive people…

Religious experience is as wide, and in fact as wild as that, and the lives and world views of a Black Elk, a Teresa of Avila, an incarnation of Vishnu and an Isaiah are as different as cultures can be, united only in the degree of their focus. Cox can list them, he can invite us to consider their experiences in turn, but he cannot entirely bring us into each of their lives. Between them and his readers is a distance not only of cultural imagination, but of conviction, of tremendous passion.

Coker reveals the struggle of many a veteran by asking: “how can someone who was there tell others what it was like? Especially if they can’t find a moral?” This is a thought that will resonate with anybody with a wartime experience. As for me, my 6 years in the Army has now all but been reduced to a handful of dinnerpartyfriendly anecdotes as a consequence of this plight.

Stern & Berger, on page 2 of their book, ISIS: The State of Terrorism, write:

It is difficult to properly convey the magnitude of the sadistic violence shown in these videos. Some featured multiple beheadings, men and women toether, with the later victims force to watch the irst die. In one video, the insurgents drove out into the streets of Iraq cities, pile out of the vehicle, and beheaded a prisoner in full view of pedestrians, capturing the whole thing on video and then driving ogg scot-free.

Some things are just hard to explain in a way that viscerally grips the reader, engendering rich and deep understanding.

The power of religion is one of them, and that’s true a fortiori of the power of its extreme form, that of those who are “semiotically aroused” — in Richard Landes‘ very useful term — by the power of an “end times” vision.

**

I have quoted the first paragraph of Tim Furnish‘s book, Holiest Wars, often enough already, and I’ll quote it again for shock value — I don’t think it’s the sort of analogy that can be “proven” or “refuted”, but it gives a visceral sense of the importance of identifying an Islamist jihadist apocalyptic movement as such, and understanding what that implies:

Muslim messianic movements are to fundamentalist uprisings what nuclear weapons are to conventional ones: triggered by the same detonating agents, but far more powerful in scope and effect.

It is a great mistake to suppose that the only writers who matter are those whom the educated in their saner moments can take seriously. There exists a subterranean world where pathological fantasies disguised as ideas are churned out by crooks and halfeducated fanatics for the benefit of the ignorant and superstitious. There are times when this underworld emerges from the depths and suddenly fascinates, captures, and dominates multitudes of usually sane and responsible people, who thereupon take leave of sanity and responsibility. And it occasionally happens that this underworld becomes a political power and changes the course of history.

**

A FIRST APPROXIMATION:

Let me take a first stab at indicating — by analogy — the level of passion involved:

Cox writes of prophecy, Sylvia Plath of electroshock treatment. In her poem, The Hanging Man:

By the roots of my hair some god got hold of me.
I sizzled in his blue volts like a desert prophet.

And her description of the same experience in her novel The Bell Jar is no less, perhaps even more powerful — note also the “end times” reference:

I shut my eyes.

There was a brief silence, like an indrawn breath.

Then something bent down and took hold of me and shook me like the end of the world. Whee-ee-ee-ee-ee, it shrilled, through an air crackling with blue light, and with each flash a great jolt drubbed me till I thought my bones would break and the sap fly out of me like a split plant.

Let me suggest to you:

Many IS members feel they have been shaken “like the end of the world” and live and breathe in “an air crackling with blue light”.

They do actually now have a sit-down restaurant with a full kitchen – but Erick’s started as a taco truck, parked by Cordova Auto Repair.
And finally – a plate of chorizo bistek. And watch out for the green sauce …

10. It is said that at one of their meetings in the gymnasiumScipio and Hannibal had a conversation on the subject of generalship, in the presence of a number of bystanders, and that Scipio asked Hannibal whom he considered the greatest general, to which the latter replied, “Alexander of Macedonia.”

To this Scipio assented since he also yielded the first place to Alexander. Then he asked Hannibal whom he placed next, and he replied, “Pyrrhus of Epirus,” because he considered boldness the first qualification of a general; “for it would not be possible,” he said, “to find two kings more enterprising than these.”

Scipio was rather nettled by this, but nevertheless he asked Hannibal to whom he would give the third place, expecting that at least the third would be assigned to him; but Hannibal replied, “To myself; for when I was a young man I conquered Spain and crossed the Alps with an army, the first after Hercules. I invaded Italy and struck terror into all of you, laid waste 400 of your towns, and often put your city in extreme peril, all this time receiving neither money nor reinforcements from Carthage.”

As Scipio saw that he was likely to prolong his self-laudation he said, laughing, “Where would you place yourself, Hannibal, if you had not been defeated by me?” Hannibal, now perceiving his jealousy, replied, “In that case I should have put myself before Alexander.” Thus Hannibal continued his self-laudation, but flattered Scipio in a delicate manner by suggesting that he had conquered one who was the superior of Alexander.

Like the great Carthaginian (as framed in Appian’s fable) but with greater circumspection, Lee gives Lee a hearty high-five for the ages here by promoting Deng to virtual Lee, making Deng almost a Lee Kuan Yew, Jr. Deng is great for “adaptibility”. Translation: Deng is great for “adaptibility” because he adapted by following Lee, who is also great for “adaptibility”. Deng is great because Lee is great. While Deng did great things, Lee claims, also circumspectly, a greater priority: Lee’s been there, done that, got the T-shirt.

Lee’s case has merit. If Lee’s memory was as accurate as it was convenient, Lee was one of the most significant figures of the twenty first century. Deng Syauping took his foot off the throats of one fifth of humanity, letting them rise from absolute poverty to genteel poverty. For that, Deng is one of the most adequate leaders of the twentieth century. If Lee helped Deng rise to adequacy, he deserves an adequate share of significance.

Lee is a frequent candidate for great authoritarian of the late twentieth century, the sort of man that, if produced on demand, would doom republican government. That great authoritarians are not produced on demand continues to be a problem for great authoritarians. Lee proved resolutely traditional in his struggle with his version of the problem: Placeholder minion. Check. Dynastic succession. Check.

Whether history gives Lee as hearty a high-five as Lee (through Deng) gave Lee depends on whether Lee’s great authoritarianism continues to be great authoritarianism without its great authoritarian. Cárdenas’ “perfect dictatorship” endured 54 years. Joseph Steel’sdead cat bounce reached 1991. Mau’s dead cat bounce carried a Deng, a Jyang, a Hu, and now a Syi. And those cabals had some component of rotation of elites built in. Lee’s die is cast with old school hereditary monarchy. His dynastic successor has an heir and two spares (three spares if Singapore doesn’t follow Salic Law). Time alone will tell if Lee Kuan Yew wins the genetic lottery now that he’s no longer around to play retired emperor.

Ernesto’s Taco Shop in Perrine, Florida has been awarded three stars for 2015, highest possible rating in the prestigious Chicagoboyz World Heritage Taqueria Guide.

]]>http://chicagoboyz.net/archives/47912.html/feed4I Am Woman …http://chicagoboyz.net/archives/47908.html
http://chicagoboyz.net/archives/47908.html#commentsSat, 21 Mar 2015 17:56:15 +0000http://chicagoboyz.net/?p=47908… hear me roar … and then turn around and whine because some cis-male said something, or looked something, and I feel so … so threatened! Look, girls…ladies … possessor of a vagina or whatever you want to be addressed as this week in vernacular fashion; can you just please pick one attitude and stick too it? Frankly, this inconsistency is embarrassing the hell out of me (sixty-ish, small-f feminist in the long-ago dark days when there was genuine no-s*it gender inequality in education, job opportunities and pay-scales to complain about and campaign for redress thereof). This is also annoying to my daughter, the thirtyish Marine Corps veteran of two hitches. The Daughter Unit is actually is very close to losing patience entirely with those of the sisterhood who are doing this “Woman Powerful!-Woman Poor Downtrodden Perpetual Victim!” bait and switch game. So am I, actually, but I have thirty years experience in biting my tongue when it comes to the antics of the Establishment Professional Capital-F Feminist crowd.

See – it’s an either-or proposition. Either you are strong, capable, intelligent and have thick enough of a skin or at least a toleration and sufficient understanding of the world in general, and the male of our sex in particular to forge your way enthusiastically through the world, throwing off the slings and arrows of outrageous misfortune, the occasional sex-based misunderstanding, the overheard crude joke, the inability of many of the males of our species to attend to details of housekeeping or good organizational order, and their juvenile enthusiasm for sexual congress under circumstances and with co-conspirators which – the less said of that the better. That is the attitude that my daughter and I personally favor; we take no stick, and when someone – male or female tries it, we hand it back face to face with generous interest. That’s what strong, capable and intelligent women do.

It’s either that or the conventions of womanhood which held sway in popular Victorian culture. That is – one who is too fine, too delicate and too gentle to endure exposure, even by the slightest suggestion to any of the above … like tweeting a picture of two guys overheard making a crude joke and setting off an internet meltdown which resulted in firings, internet shamings, death threats and everything but the burning of Atlanta. Seriously, what Ms Richards overheard and took exception to – essentially complaining to a wide audience that “Ohhh – those awful men were making me feel threatened! Make them stop!” was relatively mild when compared to some of the conversations I overheard (or sometimes participated in) while in the military. I can only imagine the degree of absolute meltdown if Ms Richards had heard some of them … and yes, both my daughter and I have often been the only woman, or one of a handful of women in a sea of men.

So, strong, capable and equal … or frail, sensitive and desperate for that fainting couch; pick one or the other and stick to it consistently. At the very least, don’t talk like one, and act like the other. It only confuses the guys and embarrasses the heck out of women like me.

(Crossposted at www.ncobrief.com)

]]>http://chicagoboyz.net/archives/47908.html/feed11A Tipping Point Approaches.http://chicagoboyz.net/archives/47906.html
http://chicagoboyz.net/archives/47906.html#commentsSat, 21 Mar 2015 16:20:06 +0000http://chicagoboyz.net/?p=47906The Obama Administration is close to announcing a deal with the government of Iran on their nuclear program. The deal will include some weak language on delay in the acquisition of a nuclear weapon by Iran and the dropping of all sanctions against the regime by the US and its European allies. This will be a disaster, in my opinion. The New York Times has another editorial today which includes delighted anticipation of the deal and more invective against Prime Minister Netanyahu who opposes the deal.

“In a way, the administration has already won,” said Aaron David Miller, a former Middle East adviser to Democratic and Republican administrations. “If you get agreement by the end of March, it will be historic in nature, it will have demonstrated that the administration is prepared to willfully stand up to Republican opposition in Congress and to deal with members of its own party who have doubts, and has withstood Israeli pressure.”

Yet since 1979, throughout his entire political career, he has systematically violated what even hard-nosed Islamic jurists might consider sacred obligations that rulers owe their subjects.

Fereydoun or Rouhani? Theologian or doctor of laws? Restorer of traditional Persian civility and patron saint of the riyal, Iran’s currency, or systematic violator of the rights of man and false prophet? More-or-less trustworthy, pragmatic interlocutor with the West or deceptive enemy? Who really is the man at the helm of the self-declared “government of prudence and hope”? What is his story?

The story is about what one would expect from this bunch. He was also involved in the “Iran-Contra” scandal of the Reagan Administration where he again played “moderate.”

He was one of the “moderates” that CIA memoranda to then-director William Casey said were on the other end of the weapons pipeline. According to Rafsanjani’s memoir, on November 3, 1985, Rouhani reported to his boss that he would soon be inspecting the newly delivered Hawk missiles, which the clerical regime had demanded in return for some half-dozen Americans held hostage in Lebanon (the number of hostages changed from time to time). In March 1986, according to Rafsanjani, Rouhani suggested that Iran should extort more Hawk missiles in return for the hostages. Rafsanjani authorized his deputy to help with “administering the political issues and the negotiations” with the visiting officials from the Reagan White House.

He has a long history as an opportunist, inherited perhaps from his father who had an instinct for choosing the right patron. He also has a fine sense of revenge, arranging the execution of Iranians who provoked him before the Revolution.

Rouhani’s autobiography stresses his intention to reorganize and enforce discipline in the new army. Other sources, however, depict him as vengeful and ruthless, a commissar less interested in revitalizing the army than in getting even with the officers who’d ridiculed him when he was in uniform. By July 1980, “Fidel Castro” had purged 12,000 servicemen. Rouhani even demanded abolishing the Army Special Operations unit and called for the public hanging of officers to terrorize the military, though Mostafa Chamran, defense minister in Prime Minister Mehdi Bazargan’s moderate transitional government, prevented this.

He even arranged the assassination of a professor who had ridiculed him as a student years before.

Rouhani’s autobiography, which details Mazlouman’s sins against Islam and insults to Rouhani, actually explains, almost glibly, why Mazlouman was assassinated. “Among the professors of the faculty, one of the professors who would in class attack the laws of Islam, was Reza Mazlouman,” Rouhani remarks, adding, “who several years ago was killed in Paris.” What Rouhani is surely doing here, with the approval of the Ministry of Intelligence’s ghostwriters, is bragging. He finally won his classroom debate.

This is who Obama and Kerry believe they will sign an “Historic Agreement.”

And Bibi Netanyahu will not stand in the way. He and Israel are to be punished.

The tense conversation came on the same day the White House announced that Denis R. McDonough, Mr. Obama’s chief of staff, would deliver the keynote address on Monday to the annual conference of J Street, a pro-Israel group aligned with Democrats that has been fiercely critical of Mr. Netanyahu.

The moves confirmed that instead of acting quickly to smooth over tensions with Mr. Netanyahu that burst to the fore in the weeks running up to the Israeli elections, the White House is stoking the acrimony.

What is less clear is whether the approach will lead to a lasting policy shift or was merely a public round of venting.

With J Street, the issue is not merely its views but its preposterous actions. Hanegbi must be conscious of how ridiculous it is to describe as “pro-Israel” an organization which actively lobbies the US government to undermine the policies of the democratically elected government of Israel.

I feel we are on a train with an engineer who is determined to take this curve far over the speed limit and who will brook no interference from Congress, Israel or any other doubter. This is an historic mistake and Israel is the modern equivalent of Czechoslovakia in 1938 which was destroyed to appease Herr Hitler.

]]>http://chicagoboyz.net/archives/47906.html/feed12“Drugs, Inc.” – the Most Important Show on Televisionhttp://chicagoboyz.net/archives/47903.html
http://chicagoboyz.net/archives/47903.html#commentsSat, 21 Mar 2015 13:45:04 +0000http://chicagoboyz.net/?p=47903“Drugs, Inc.” is a television show on the National Geographic Channel that focuses on the business of drugs, from producers to traffickers to users to police. I can’t recommend this show enough and I watch every episode that comes up on my DVR.

Welcome to the $300 billion industry of Drugs, Inc., where traffickers pocket huge profits, addicts become chained in a vicious cycle and law enforces wage war across diverse battlefields – farmers’ fields, shady labs, urban street corners and suburban schools. How does this business work? Can it be stopped or should it be regulated? What impact does it have on those it touches?

Drugs Inc somehow gets interviews with drug dealers and drug traffickers. They are always wearing a mask of some sort and often their voices are garbled electronically. It isn’t clear to me why they agree to be on TV or why the authorities don’t follow up on the leads from the program or subpoena their records. I can’t comment on the authenticity but it certainly seems real, especially the interviews with the users or “fiends” as they are described by the dealers on the series.

The first thing that the show will do for you is change how you look at homeless people. All of the users on the show are either 1) drug dealers themselves likely far down the chain in order to support their habit 2) panhandlers or some sort of schemer / prostitute. There occasionally are recreational users or those with jobs but since they typically interview hard-core drug users many of those individuals can’t do a regular 9 to 5 job.

The panhandlers are a relentless lot. They wake up in various places, sometimes in their cars, sometimes in a tent, sometimes in an abandoned building, or elsewhere. When they get up, it is time to make some money in order to buy some drugs. They always know exactly what they are doing and have a target amount of money to “earn” in order to score what they need to stave off dope sickness.

When they hit their target number, they either hit a drug house (or “trap” in the lingo) or call / text their dealer and start off on the trek to obtain the drugs. Then the show follows the user as they go into a public toilet or an alley or a house somewhere and shoot up (for heroin). I usually look away as they do the drugs because it can be gruesome especially for long time users where they can’t find a vein anymore. One of the prostitutes spent over an hour looking for a spot that worked (per the show) and another prostitute lamented when she had to use a vein on her forehead because it hurt her earning power.

For a bit right after they get their “hit” the panhandlers / prostitutes are momentarily happy and lucid. Often they lament their state and say that this helps take the pain away from their predicament. They might say that once they did well in school or had a wife and a family but now they are a strung-out junkie and they can’t believe that their life ended up like this.

One element of the show that is particularly noteworthy is that there isn’t usually the typical “story arc” of 1) have a problem 2) struggle to overcome the problem 3) leave on a note of happy resolution. In Hawaii they followed a crystal meth user who lived at home with his mom; the previous day he tried to hang himself. They interviewed him the next day and he stole his mom’s car and sold it for cash to pay for meth. And that’s the end of the show. Another time they interviewed a male prostitute who ran out of money and had been off drugs for 4 days, long enough that he was no longer very sick. He scored some money and talked to the interviewer about how he ought to just get out of there and get his life together but instead he was going to take this money, find his dealer, and get some drugs. And that’s what he did.

You will also gain a deep appreciation for the bloodthirsty efficiency of the Mexican drug cartels. These cartels have apparently cornered the US market on many types of drugs and operate an enormous network of Mexican nationals across the USA. They interview many individuals associated with the market and they routinely make comments like “a woman trafficker was talking about quitting so they pulled her out of the car and cut her head off right in front of me” or “If my drug shipments keep getting intercepted they will kill me”. Several of the episodes were in Mexico and they interviewed a drug enforcer with an assault rifle who was heading out to eliminate someone that the cartel wanted dead and he said he had killed many with that gun. It seemed very real. The police that they interviewed also had praise for the power of the cartels and their ability to isolate the local dealers into “cells” and keep all parts of their chain (from supply to trafficking to dealing to money laundering) apart from one another so it was very difficult for the police to get individuals to “flip” and go higher up the chain of command.

I highly recommend this show and think it represents great journalism. Their reporters are on helicopters in the jungle raiding poppy fields and in the most dangerous neighborhoods in the USA talking to drug dealers and users. However they get this show done, I don’t always understand, but it is always riveting.

]]>http://chicagoboyz.net/archives/47903.html/feed19Sunset in Chicagohttp://chicagoboyz.net/archives/47899.html
http://chicagoboyz.net/archives/47899.html#commentsSat, 21 Mar 2015 13:19:39 +0000http://chicagoboyz.net/?p=47899Recently I visited my friend to see their new baby and they had fantastic views of the city looking west and north. Not a bad photo from my iPhone 6… my iPhone 5 and 4 cameras were terrible.

]]>http://chicagoboyz.net/archives/47899.html/feed7Of Stories, Character, and Beliefshttp://chicagoboyz.net/archives/47893.html
http://chicagoboyz.net/archives/47893.html#commentsFri, 20 Mar 2015 22:17:09 +0000http://chicagoboyz.net/?p=47893Here I will link several posts that I see as related. At the moment I don’t have time to tie them together in a coherent way, so will just put them out there in a somewhat disconnected fashion in the hope of sparking some good discussion.

I would like to see a study of decision-making based on how much fiction one consumes. My hypothesis is that consumers of fiction will draw their “experience” in part from fiction and it will warp their understanding of what is practical or possible in the real world…I think exposure to fiction makes you less grounded in the real world (subconsciously) and more likely to make decisions the way the captain of the Enterprise would have done it, for example.

This is a quite different view of the role and value of fiction from the one expressed in an article I summarized in my post Fiction and Empathy:

In one experiment, researcher Keith Oatley and colleagues assessed the reading habits of 94 adults, separating fiction from nonfiction. They also tested the subjects on measures of emotion perception (being able to discern a person’s emotional state from a photo of only the eyes) and social cognition (being able to draw conclusions about the relationships among people based on video clips.) This study showed a “strong” interconnection between fiction reading and social skills, especially between fiction reading and the emotion-perception factor. This correlation, of course, does not by itself demonstrate the direction of causality. Another study involved assigning 303 adults to read either a short story or an essay from the New Yorker and following up with tests of analytical and social reasoning. Those who read the story tended to do better on the social reasoning test than those who read the nonfiction essay.

Unlike historical accounts, through well-drawn characters it is possible to absorb the world through another perspective, an immensely valuable skill for investors looking for ideas (or trouble). A memory bank of fictional characters will also help when the market “hive mind” pushes prices in unexpected directions, answering the question “what kind of person buys here?” The primary lesson of fiction is learning “this is how people act”, when they’re scared, confident, happy, determined or demoralized. Not how I would act, or how I think they should act, but how the combination of different experiences and different patterns of cognition lead to aggregate outcomes. Empathy.

In her post the message and the story , SF writer Sarah Hoyt offers some thoughts on how novels can influence the worldviews of their readers:

But part of it is that I doubt the effectiveness of overt messages in stories. I don’t scruple to say I was raised by Heinlein, nor that I wasn’t the only one. The man might have had no biological kids, but he has sons and daughters all over the world, including me.

But then we have to look at how he raised me. Remember I came at Heinlein through (mostly) the later books because most of the Juveniles (Door Into Summer and Have Spacesuit Will Travel excepted) were either not translated to Portuguese or no longer available when I came along. And yet, what I took from his books was not the obvious messages: “Though art God” or the bedhopping or multiple marriages as the natural way to live. (Oh, for a while, but that was the spirit of the times, too, being the late seventies.) What I took from the books were not so much the messages as “the way to be.”

By creating characters that were tough, questioning, strong, and, most of all, useful, he made me want to be that way. I took as my model (being touched in the upper works) the broken caryatid, not just for characters but for what a human being should be, lifting whatever the burden without complaining.

Now, it takes a certain type of personality to teach at that level. I’ve seen it in some teachers, too, who, regardless of whether they teach you history or English, really give you a model you aspire to being. The left, being daft, thinks this has to do with the character/teacher looking like you. They think only black people can model to black children. This is part of their insanity with “there must be so many characters of tan per book.” And also with promoting incompetent teachers to positions of power, because they have a certain ancestry or skin color.

But it doesn’t work that way. It’s more subtle. It’s more about being who you are in such a strong and convincing way and making the characteristics you have or approve of so admirable that people want to follow them. Which is what Heinlein did.

In the article on Fiction and Empathy, Dr Oatley cites work attempting to assess the impact of different kinds of media on the empathy effect. In one test involving preschool children, it was found that kids reading more stories or watching more movies had higher empathy, but that the empathy levels were *not* higher among those who watched a lot of television. Oatley suggests that the reason probably lies in the fact that TV shows explore fewer topics and themes that require adopting a character’s point of view. I suspect that to the extent this effect is real, it is probably more a consequence of the stories being told, rather than the the experiential characteristics of the media themselves. In particular, I’d guess that both the TV programs and the movies which are engineered to appeal to particular demographics are much less likely to be empathy-promoting than those that are developed via the individual creativity of authors/screenwriters.

But I do think the kind of media used to tell a given story can have a major influence on the story’s psychological effect, as McLuhan argued long ago. See my post metaphors, interfaces, and though processes, in which I reference the work of Neal Stephenson in distinguishing between the explicit word-based interface to information and the graphical or sensorial interface. In the realm of fiction, a novel would be an example of the first category, whereas the same story presented as a movie or a TV program would be an example of the second. I said:

I’d observe that as a general matter, the sensorial interface is less open to challenge than the textual interface. It doesn’t argue–doesn’t present you with a chain of facts and logic that let you sit back and say, “Hey, wait a minute–I’m not so sure about that.” It just sucks you into its own point of view.

…and mentioned the so-called “tunnels of oppression” which have become popular for indoctrination educational purposes on many college campuses as examples of sensory-mode information presentation.

I don’t think there’s any question but that Scott Adams is correct about the influence of fiction on belief systems, and would argue that the influence is generally stronger and much less subject to conscious questioning when the story is presented in iconic form (movie, TV, “tunnel of oppression”) rather than in text form. I’m sure there are many people who have seen movies with dramatic scenes of cities being drowned by rising sea levels, said to be caused by global warming, who were influenced to be worried about “climate change,” without necessarily reviewing the evidence about such climate change or lack of same. Similarly, I’m sure that Nazi-era propaganda movies portraying Jews as subhuman influenced many Germans in the direction of such beliefs, even though the cinematic Jews had little or nothing in common with the real, everyday Jews that these Germans knew personally.

But I don’t conclude therefore that fiction is a bad thing or that it makes one “less grounded in the real world,” as Scott Adams put it….quite the contrary, I believe that a broad diet of fiction generally makes one more grounded in the real world. The danger occurs when all or most of the fiction tends to point in the direction of a particular worldview–especially a worldview strongly demanded by those who control state power or are on the edge of getting it–with little or none pointing in the other direction.

Thoughts?

]]>http://chicagoboyz.net/archives/47893.html/feed8Ichneumonoideahttp://chicagoboyz.net/archives/47887.html
http://chicagoboyz.net/archives/47887.html#commentsWed, 18 Mar 2015 16:52:48 +0000http://chicagoboyz.net/?p=47887I was reading a slightly ick-making article the other day about certain wasps which prey on caterpillars in a peculiar and parasitic manner – the female wasp injects her eggs into the body of the chosen prey, where they hatch into grubs and feed from the host … from the inside. In certain varieties, it appears that the inserted eggs/grubs affect the biochemistry of the luckless host, which eats and eats, but never to benefit itself. Entomologists who specialize in this kind of thing find this adaptation immensely fascinating, which is why I was reading about it, through a link form some place or other. It’s all very Alien, on a insect level, and the likeness to the movie doesn’t end there; eventually, the wasp grubs chew their way out through the body of the caterpillar … and wait – the dying caterpillar serves to the last gasp as a sort of insectoid bodyguard to the developing wasps, even sheltering them in the silk which would have made its own cocoon. And then the caterpillar dies and the fully-developed wasps fly away, to start the cycle all over again.

Then I read about how the Obamas took separate presidential flight aircraft from the east coast to the west in order that the president and his spouse could appear on two different shows, videoed at two different studios barely miles apart and within the same time frame, at great expense to the military organization which operates the aircraft in question. Really, couldn’t they have shared a flight and halved the expense … or is it that they just don’t care for each other or for much else besides their own comfort and convenience. The Obamas do appear to like the bennies and goodies that the office provides, and enjoy them with a hearty carelessness wholly befitting the court of Louis the 14th. Save that Louis and Marie Antoinette weren’t quite the feckless, arrogant aristos that they were portrayed by contemporary propagandists. Still – the reputation endures; of aristocrats enjoying themselves in a bubble of privilege and luxury, while all outside the bubble goes to rack and ruin.

The whole process of the parasitic wasp and the helpless caterpillar struck me as a metaphor for the current administration, and indeed, our current Ruling Class, in the Angelo Codevilla sense; an alien organism injecting itself into the American body politic with the sole selfish intent of surviving and enriching itself at the expense of the host … and then, of course, flying away to some gated community, fat with privilege gained from destroying the host. Of course, the ruling elite of every civilization have always rather disdained the common working folk, the bourgeoisie, the working class who made up the body of those ruled – t’was ever thus, the exploiter and the exploited. At the very least, the ruling elite have condescended to them as the ‘backbone of the country’. Our current ruling class elite has also distinguished themselves by adding to the injury of exploitation the insult of holding the larger body of citizens in active contempt … contempt which verges on hatred, depending on the person voicing it.